Provided enterprise-class technology support to the faculty, staff and administration of a technology- focused high school. Maintained and supported products from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, Citrix, VM Ware, Cisco, Oracle and more. Provided in-person and remote support for hardware, software and services for end-users at all skill levels. Independently prioritized and balanced time sensitive tasks with long-term goals.Additional responsibilities included regular facilitation of school and town events with audio and visual support. Worked with counterparts at other schools within the district, technology integration specialists and the network services team to help troubleshoot problems. Had a unique opportunity to mentor a student with tech aspirations through an independent study and internship program.

Feb
2010 -
Apr
2013

Repair Technician Level 2 / Élan Technologies

Diagnosed and repaired Apple products as a technician for the area’s largest Apple Authorized Service Provider. Worked daily with Apple’s GSX system and frequently with third-party products like Lightspeed, JAMF and Crashplan. Accountable for extensive troubleshooting, independent thinking and determining creative solutions across multiple lines and generations of Apple products. Delivered a high quality customer experience, even when sharing difficult news. Given responsibility to make the right call, not just follow policy. Appreciated learning the intricacies of growing and maintaining a small business.

Sept
2006 -
Dec
2009

Inventory Control Specialist / Apple

Responsible for inventory control at a high-volume Apple Store where there was never a dull moment. Balanced daily responsibilities with long-term goals and meeting the diverse needs of multiple departments. Interacted with many teams and levels of management, both retail and corporate. Took part in special projects and and product launches, including the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. An extraordinary experience with an extraordinary company.

Nov
2005 -
Jul
2006

Sales Representative / Verizon Wireless

Chosen for a pilot program that involved working an independent Verizon kiosk inside a partner store. Responsible for creating a great customer experience from start to finish, from finding, presenting, closing and activating to following up with customers. Received extensive sales training and developed the ability to translate technical details into common understanding.

Jan
1998 -
Jun
2005

Cook / Max & Erma's

Transitioned and grew through a variety of roles — from busser to host to cook, then finally prep cook — during a long tenure. Learned about working with diverse personalities and the value of family.

Today was Amanda’s first day at work at Gap Inc. - and so far, so good! The photo above is taken from the front of the building, facing the Bay Bridge. Needless to say, views from higher floors in the building are quite stunning.

We’ve done some preliminary exploring of our new city, but there’s still a ton to see and learn as we look for our permanent home. More to come as we settle in!

The weather here is insanely perfect: 64 degrees and sunny. We picked up dinner at Whole Foods Market (which is on the bottom floor of our temporary apartment building) and are all prepped for an evening of UFC, laundry, and general settling in.

Tomorrow we’ll focus on making sure Amanda is ready to start work on Monday, and starting our home search plan.

We left Boston exactly four weeks ago today. And tomorrow (Saturday), we’ll finally arrive in our new home city of San Francisco.

Today was primarily spent driving up Highway 1 (AKA “The One” or The Pacific Highway"). To say the experience was breathtaking is an understatement. From sandy beaches to stunning cliffs and twisty roads carved into massive mountains, we saw beauty at every turn. And the Pacific Ocean itself was a grand turquoise and blue beauty showing off her many moods along the way, from playing with surfers and tourists by sandy beaches to fiercely crashing against massive rocky shores. It was an experience we will never forget.

We’ve ended the day in Monterey, hitting up a local pub before shacking up for the night.

We started the day with coffee by Petco Park (shout out to the Roast Coach - best iced coffee ever) before checking out of our hotel and driving to the San Diego Zoo.

We spent a few hours at the zoo, braving the crowds to see all kinds of cool animals, most notably the giraffes (there was a two-week old baby!), Pygmy hippos, and of course the pandas. We separately posted a bunch of photos in two other posts.

After leaving the zoo, we started driving up the coast, stopping in Del Mar for an amazing dinner of halibut, risotto and asparagus at Brigantine. The views of the Pacific Ocean were stunning along the entire route … completely breathtaking.

We hopped on 5 North for the rest of our trip, making our way through Los Angeles in blinding evening sun before arriving in tonight’s stop, Ventura. It’s been a long day of zooing and driving, so we’re ready to rest up. Good night from CA!

Posting this for a few reasons. First, Jeff has always thought it was a funny, well done video for the situation (Conan O'Brian moving from NYC to LA for the ill-fated Tonight Show). Second, it seems very appropriate for our own road trip from east coast to west coast. Finally, we’re currently ploughing through the LA traffic and just passed the exit for Hollywood.

We are in California! AND we officially crossed the 5,000 mile mark today (in Buckeye, AZ, amusingly enough) - two big milestones for our trip.

It’s been another super long driving day, from Sedona in northern Arizona to San Diego in southern California. The scenery was incredible, from the red rocks of Sedona to the mountains of southern Arizona and southern California, to the straight-up desert near the California/Mexico border. We went through two border control inspection points (with no issues of course!) and hit temps up to 115 degrees along the way. Kudos to the GTI for being such a trooper in the heat.

We got into San Diego just before 8pm, where we’re staying at the wonderful Hotel Indigo. It’s trendy and posh, yet super chill and comfortable. We had dinner and drinks at the rooftop bar, relaxing on a couch by the fire … and it was a struggle not to just fall asleep right there! The weather here is pretty much perfect.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to the San Diego zoo - our last panda experience! - before hitting the road up the California coast.

We said goodbye to Albuquerque by 6am and drove through some truly beautiful scenery - including a quick stop at the Petrified Forest - on our way to today’s stop, Sedona. Amanda drove the second part of today’s route, which included some seriously curvy, gorgeous but mildly terrifying cliff side roads. She has some work to do before making her Top Gear debut.

We arrived in Sedona around 11:30am (PST), checked into our hotel, and headed to the Olde Sedona Bar and Grille to secure good seats for the USA vs Belgium game. The food was great, and the crowd was a little nuts, so it was definitely a good choice. Jeff stayed through the heartbreaking end while Amanda headed out during the first overtime to get a massage and manicure.

Our evening was very exciting: we laid down for a “nap” and just woke up.

Tomorrow, we’ll have breakfast and do a little local exploring before hitting the road to San Diego. That’s right… Tomorrow, we arrive in California to start the final leg of our journey to San Francisco!

We picked up a souvenir succulent back in Folly but haven’t come up with a name for the ‘lil guy. If you can think of an appropriate name then text, tweet, message, comment or email us your suggestions and we will pick a winner once we reach San Francisco (which is only a few days away)!

It’s been a lonnnnng day of driving from Dallas to Albuquerque - about 650 miles. We are beat.

It’s one of those days that feels like more than one day, since this morning we were with our lovely friends in Dallas and spent a few fun hours at the Perot Museum, yet now we’re in New Mexico and feel a million miles away. But - we’re that much closer to California!

While we were on the road, we had some great Mexican food, Amanda got first week scoop from her new boss, we visited a totally random car museum attached to a roadside gas station/convenience store, and we watched a gorgeous sunset. We also took advantage of the time to make our San Francisco apartment wish list, so it’ll be interesting to see how close we can get!

Tomorrow, we’ll get up super early and do a shorter day of driving to Sedona, where we’ll watch the USA vs Belgium game and Amanda will hopefully get some spa treatments.

We explored the Memphis Zoo in a massive downpour, complete with one passed out panda and another who wouldn’t turn around to face us. But hey - pandas! We mostly had the zoo to ourselves human-wise, and very few animals were out too. More pictures to come later.

All in all, our Memphis Zoo experience felt a little like Jurassic Park, and we left soaking wet and a bit eaten up by mosquitos.

From there, we had a hell of a time getting out of Memphis, thanks to lots of flooded streets and construction. Between the insanity of trying to leave Memphis, the excessive construction in Arkansas, and a crazy accident in Texas that shut down the highway, today’s drive took almost four hours longer than expected and was generally pretty miserable.

However, despite all that, we arrived safely in Dallas and had a wonderful (but way too short) evening with our friends Katie and Nate and their son, Hudson. After some fantastic barbecue, good local beer, and hours of great conversation, we’re headed to bed.

Zoo Atlanta did not disappoint. The pandas were highly entertaining (check out the videos posted earlier for maximum high jinks). Amanda made friends with giraffes (yet another video posted earlier). The king cobra was sufficiently terrifying. All in all, another great zoo experience!

Around noon, we hit the road to Memphis, driving through Alabama and Mississippi before arriving in Tennessee. It’s been storming like crazy since we checked into our hotel, so we opted to order pizza and watch HGTV for the night vs braving the thunderstorms.

Tomorrow, we’ll visit the Memphis zoo in the morning, then it’s onward to Dallas!

After laundry, some last minute shopping, and a quick bite to eat, we said our goodbyes to Folly Beach and hit the road to Atlanta under big southern skies.

We arrived in Atlanta around 6pm and did a quick change of clothes before heading to the High Museum of Art. The Dream Cars exhibit - featuring concept cars through history - was fascinating and quite incredible. We ended up exploring several other exhibits at the museum, too, taking advantage of their extended hours on Friday nights.

After a super long day, we opted for an easy dinner - jimmy johns delivery - and HGTV to close out the evening. Tomorrow: twin baby pandas at the Atlanta Zoo, then another long drive to Memphis!

We were up before sunrise to walk the beach in search of turtle tracks. No luck, but we did have a lovely walk and witness a beautiful sunrise.

After a nap, we had lunch at Snapper Jack’s and watched the USA v. Germany game. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach, swimming and relaxing in the sun.

While we were getting ready for dinner (an encore visit to Taco Boy!) we got to watch a wedding from our hotel balcony, and now Amanda is all about starting a Folly Weddings Alumni group for people married here.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to our beloved Folly Beach - which is never easy, but we are excited to start our journey west to our new California home.

After being previewed at an event back in June, Withings began taking pre-orders today for Activité – an analogue watch with built-in fitness tracker.

Withings describes the pre-order as a chance to reserve one of a limited number available for shipping by the first week of December, prior to the device’s official launch. The Activité is being sold for $450 with your choice of two colors. The black model features a black face on silver bezel with black leather strap, and the white model has a white face on silver bezel with tan leather strap. Both models have a Swiss construction, stainless steel body, sapphire glass cover, are water resistant to 165ft and have an estimated eight-month battery life. Complete details and pre-orders are available on the official website here.

Withings is attempting to differentiate itself from the suddenly crowded fitness tracker / smart watch market by positioning the Activité as a premium device with classic looks and unbeatable battery life. The face of the watch has a traditional analog dial for telling time and a smaller secondary dial for displaying progress towards your daily activity goal. All other interactions such as sleep tracking and the silent vibration alarm are handled via Bluetooth LE and the Withings Health Mate App for iOS. Market mainstay Fitbit has recently taken the opposite approach; it moved down market with the new, lower-cost Charge around the same time Microsoft quietly launched its own product, the Band. Like most of the competing products, these devices are rubberized for protection and have a digital screen, requiring daily recharging. Dedicated fitness trackers are also attempting to define their need in the face of more feature-rich smart watches such as the Moto 360, LG G Watch R and the (pending release) Apple Watch, all of which promise to do fitness tracking along with a host of more advanced features like media playback and interactive notifications from your smartphone.

It’s too early to see if the Activité will be a success, but after one day of pre-ordering, the Withings website shows less than 20% of the first batch still available.

Over the past two days, BlackBerry has rolled out an update to its BBM app across all four major smartphone platforms (Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS and Windows Phone). This update is meant to debut many new features to users, while also signaling a coming shift in the cost of using the app.

BBM may stand for BlackBerry Messenger, but the platform has grown far beyond its instant messaging/SMS roots. Not afraid to incorporate features that may have been popularized on other apps or platforms, BBM is fast growing in capability. Skype, Snapchat, Spotify, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter – you name a popular social messaging app, and BlackBerry has crafted a facimile of its core differentiator and bolted it onto BBM.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what BlackBerry has added in the latest update for BBM.

– Timed Messages – Allows you to set a time limit after which a message or picture will disappear from the recipient’s chat window.
– Message Retraction – Lets you remove (retract) a message or picture from a chat after it’s been sent.
– Sticker Picker – Provides a new, faster way of inserting a sticker into a message.
– HD Picture Transfer – Does what it says
– Music Discovery – Shares the track you are listening to and gives you a feed of what music your contacts are hearing. Links to each platform’s respective music store.

These new features join other recent BBM additions, like voice calling, voice notes, channels, paid sticker packs and location sharing. But what BBM is not boasting about may be less attractive to users: its subscription model. Noted in passing on the official BBM blog, author Jeff Gadway writes:

BlackBerry has not released any other information about what form subscriptions for BBM could take, though it already has paid sticker packs and advertising in-app. Users have already shown a willingness to pay in-app, but it remains to be seen if BlackBerry can turn BBM into a freemium revenue model.

BlackBerry BBM is available now for BBOS 10, iOS 7+, Android 4.0+ and Windows Phone 8+. Download it here.

To imbue human emotion to an inanimate object is among the most difficult tasks in marketing. Volkswagen accomplishes this perfectly in their spot “Kombi Last Wishes” – which says goodbye to the iconic VW Microbus.

A great marketing effort made all the more impressive considering it is for a discontinued product. The only similar spot that comes to mind is the Ikea “Lamp” commercial (History).

As Geoffrey Fowler correctly interprets, this Mac Pro is an elite supercar compared to most Macs or PCs. Since it was revealed in June, I’ve been forming a similar opinion on the Mac Pro (Late 2013). The comparison draws from Steve Jobs’ appearance at the D8 conference, where he discussed the PC’s place in the newly coined “Post-PC” era (Text/Video).

The only problem with the new Mac Pro, as I see it, is that Apple delivered a fantastic supercar – to replace their truck. Imagine the reactions if Ford positioned the GT as a replacement for the F-650. The big box allowed anyone to customize the Mac Pro to their needs while providing a reliable chassis for sustained loads. The new model has fewer options while moving reliability and longevity into an unknowable category.

Looking under the hood shell of the Mac Pro reveals a beautiful, forward-looking machine at the limits of today’s technology, much like the original 2008 MacBook Air. That machine was compromised from the start, between performance, heat and size, while suffering from reliability issues and ultimately a short lifespan. Other cutting-edge Macs have encountered these types of compromises as well, such as the MacBook or PowerMac G4 Cube. They were also known for a lack of performance and/or questionable reliability. Ideally, this next generation Mac Pro will avoid the pitfalls of previous first-generation Macs.

The Anandtech review, however, shows that the Mac Pro has a craving for PCIe lanes – like a supercar craves more air for combustion. More than anything, the available number of PCIe lanes seemed to have dictated the direction of the Mac Pro. One SSD, shared USB3 throughput, paired Thunderbolt channels and lack of internal expansion are all driven by the limited number of communication channels the Intel platform provides.

Setting aside the possibility of retaining the old form factor, it would’ve been nice to see more diverse configuration options for the Mac Pro to better suit the needs of its users. What about swapping one of the GPUs with a another CPU? Or sacrificing a GPU for more storage (SSD) slots? How about extra RAM slots? Mismatched GPUs with a high-end consumer (gaming) option? Heck, why not a new card slot standard to drop whatever you want into the second GPU space? These are the kind of options I would like to see in future revisions of the Mac Pro.

Walking back slightly from a one-size-fits-all attitude and providing a highly configurable chassis would be the ideal direction in which to take the Mac Pro for future revisions. As impressive a supercar as it may be, there’s still room for a true truck-style Mac Pro in the line up.

Does the NSA collectively understand that whatever good intentions they may have, their actions have been dangerous and deeply offending? The feelings of betrayal they have for Snowden are exactly the same as our feelings towards them.

Privacy and censorship are reduced to shades of grey as the west gives up the high moral ground it used to oppose unfriendly governments. What will the cost be to the global economy and international cooperation? And for the Internet’s future growth?

Rather than an in-depth editorial, here is a list of suggested improvements to the usability of Spotlight (search) and Springboard (home screen) in iOS 7:

Allow Spotlight to be toggled from within a folder.

Allow Spotlight to be toggled from within an app; either a new in-app, system-wide gesture or tuck it into Notification Center or Control Center. Or …

Allow Spotlight to be toggled from within the multitasking window.

Make a push of the home button drop you back to the last page of apps you were on (or page one if already on a different page of apps). Being dropped into a folder or some other sub-view (Newsstand) is the wrong action. Page one (home) should never be more than two taps of the home button away.

Decide what is Newsstand is (an app? A folder?) and make it show up in Spotlight.

Make app and iCloud data searchable in Spotlight. PDFs, metadata, tags, file types, text … just like on the desktop, these things should be found when searching in Spotlight, no matter which app they live in.

Give folders a static indicator of place within the home screen. The iOS 6 style of a split screen with a notch was more intuitive and obvious than the zooming alone in iOS 7.

Correct the accuracy and/or velocity of apps when scrolling from side-to-side in multitasking view. Or maybe just slow it down!

When you want to use a photo in iOS, the typical path is to tap a camera or share icon, then choose from one of two options: take a new photo or choose from the library. What’s needed is a third standard option: to use the last photo added to the camera roll. While some apps have manually coded a solution to this iOS oversight, it really ought to be a system-wide default option. This addition to the OS would allow any app to increase the speed and ease of use for users when choosing a photo.

The icon changes to iOS 7 have not been without some controversy. Having lived with iOS for several months now (after upgrading to the iPhone 5S), there is a sense of acceptance and familiarity with the new look of iOS. For better or for worse, the icons just live amongst each other without much thought from the user. Two icons in particular feel out of place though; reversed even. The icons for Voice Memos and Siri feel like they would be more effective if switched.

The new icon for Voice Memos in iOS 7 features a linear graph of sound, while Siri went with a microphone. It seems that this is the wrong use of two great icons. Voice Memos doesn’t just look at your voice, it records the audio. Like a microphone does. And Siri: it doesn’t record your voice for playback later, it listens your voice, like an analyzer. Siri even betrays this mix up, as it uses both the microphone icon and an animated wave of the sound when listening to your voice.

Hopefully someone at Apple with the power to act will feel the same way, and swap these two icons to their logical places.